🪟 WinStasis

A lightweight, native C# Window Session Manager built for power users.

winst is a command-line utility designed to capture, save, and seamlessly restore the exact positions, sizes, states, and Virtual Desktops of Windows applications. It is built to tame the chaos of multi-workspace reboots and ensure that critical tools—including accessibility overlays and development environments—stay exactly where they belong.

🛠️ Usage & Installation

Requirements

• For Users: Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit). No .NET runtime installation is required, as the published release is completely self-contained.
• For Developers: .NET 10.0 SDK is required. Dependencies (such as NuGet packages) are defined in the project files and will be automatically restored by the build system.

Global Installation (Add to PATH)

To use winst globally from any terminal, you should publish it as a self-contained executable:

# Build a standalone .exe
dotnet publish -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained true -p:PublishSingleFile=true

# The resulting winst.exe will be output to:
# WinStasis\bin\Release\net10.0-windows10.0.19041.0\win-x64\publish\

# Add this folder to your system's %PATH% Environment Variable.

Storage Location

Saved session profiles are securely stored in your local Windows AppData directory: %LOCALAPPDATA%\WinStasis\sessions\

Commands

# Save current layout across ALL Virtual Desktops
winst save coding

# Overwrite an existing profile
winst save coding --force

# List all windows in a profile with Target IDs and human-readable Workspaces
winst list coding

# Restore all windows in a profile (Across all Desktops!)
winst restore coding

# Restore a specific window by its Target ID
winst restore coding --target 5

Note on Elevated Windows: Windows User Interface Privilege Isolation (UIPI) prevents normal applications from moving windows owned by an Administrator. To restore Admin-level apps (like an elevated PowerShell prompt), you must run winst from an Administrator terminal.

💾 Profile Storage & Format

Profiles are saved as JSON files inside the standardized Windows Local AppData directory: %LOCALAPPDATA%\WinStasis\sessions\

Session JSON Example

{
  "ProfileName": "coding",
  "CreatedAt": "2026-05-18T12:00:00",
  "Windows": [
    {
      "TargetId": 1,
      "Hwnd": 0,
      "ProcessName": "WindowsTerminal",
      "WindowTitle": "PowerShell",
      "X": 100,
      "Y": 100,
      "Width": 800,
      "Height": 600,
      "ShowCmd": 1,
      "DesktopId": "cb9b56f8-276a-405f-b560-b4d97c759c98",
      "IsPinned": false
    }
  ]
}

• ShowCmd: 1 (Normal), 2 (Minimized), 3 (Maximized).
• DesktopId: The GUID of the Virtual Desktop. 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 represents the "Global" workspace.
• IsPinned: true if the window is pinned globally to appear on all Virtual Desktops simultaneously.

🛤️ Future Directions & Offshoots

The core MVP is complete. We are exploring stable offshoots that utilize the robust "Observer" engine we've built here:

• vdtree: Verbose Window Inspector: A read-only CLI tool that provides deep, structured metadata about the Windows desktop layer in a human-readable tree format.
• Caster UIA Context Engine: A micro-service utilizing Microsoft UI Automation (UIA) to track keyboard focus inside specific application panes to trigger ultra fine-grained, context-aware speech grammars for the Caster accessibility toolkit.
• Phase 5 (Deferred): Multi-Monitor Topology Mapping: Deep hardware mapping to perfectly restore coordinates across complex docking/undocking scenarios (currently handled safely, but simply, via Boundary Clamping).